Orally administered medicaments are given to the patient in many forms, such as liquid solutions, emulsions, or suspensions, or in solid form such as capsules or tablets (as used herein, the term "tablet" means any shaped and compressed solid dosage form, including caplets). Medicaments administered in tablet or capsule form are usually intended to be swallowed whole. Therefore, the often disagreeable taste of the active ingredient need not be taken into account in formulating the medicine, except for the provision of means to prevent the taste from being apparent during the short time that the medicine is in the mouth. Such means may include the provision of an appropriately thin and quickly dissolving coating on the tablet, the use of the gelatin capsule form (the gelatin outer shell of the capsule keeps the active ingredient inside until the capsule has been swallowed), or simply compressing a tablet firmly so that it will not begin to disintegrate during the short time that it is intended to be in the mouth.
Children, older persons, and many other persons have trouble swallowing whole tablets and even capsules. Therefore, in cases where the dosage to be administered cannot be made into a very small tablet or capsule, it is desirable to provide the medicine either in liquid form or in a chewable solid form, in addition to the tablet or capsule that is designed to be swallowed whole. Even where the medicine can be formulated as a liquid, it is desirable also to be able to provide a chewable solid form because it is usually more convenient to carry a supply of tablets with oneself all day than a container of liquid medicine.
A common problem with chewable tablet forms is the often disagreeable taste of the active ingredient which manifests itself during chewing. In some cases, the taste of the active medicament in a tablet can be overpowered by adding flavoring ingredients to the tablet so that when it is chewed, the taste of the active ingredient is simply overpowered. For instance, this has been done with children's aspirin where the dosage is small enough so that the amount of flavoring agents needed to mask the taste of the medicine is not so great that the tablet becomes unreasonably large. A different approach is taken with a commercially available children's size tablet of acetaminophen (acetyl para-aminophenol or "APAP") wherein the APAP is present in granules that are coated with ethyl cellulose. A significant proportion of the APAP remains shielded by the coating (and therefore does not contribute to taste) while the tablet is in the mouth, despite some breakage of the ethyl cellulose coating during compression of the tablet and some additional breakage of the coating during chewing. The APAP becomes bioavailable via permeation through the coating (although ethyl cellulose is not soluble in aqueous fluids, water does permeate through the coating) and from the granules where the coating is broken.
The present invention is directed to the discovery of a granulating and coating process for active medicaments which can achieve a better balance between taste masking and bioavailability than ethyl cellulose or other previously known coating combinations.